Page 68 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘What?’

He was in no state to decide. ‘I said, could you make the coffee?’

Shenkov looked relieved for something to do.

Valery shut the office door behind him and went over to Tatiana. He was genuinely impressed with the drawing; she was good.

‘Was Dad being bad?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘At school, Comrade Alexandrovna says that if people start sneaking around and doing bad things like whispering and being spies, we have to tell her all about it. I want to catch a spy one day,’ she added hopefully.

Valery smiled. ‘No. Your dad’s boringly good. We were talking about your blood. Some things have gone wrong in it, which is why you’re ill. Can I show you?’

She nodded and watched as he put the slide back under the microscope, and refocused it to show her the sick white cells, and how they were different to his own.

‘This is what’s making you so ill,’ he said, sitting back and sharply aware that he smelled of cigarettes, and that she wouldn’t want to breathe that for a second longer than she had to. ‘It’s not something we know how to cure. That means you will probably die of it. Do you know what dying is?’

She nodded again. ‘You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’

She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’

‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.’

‘Will I know?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’

She looked worried.

‘That’s the best kind of research,’ he said gently. ‘The chance to find out a thing no one knows – that’s not something that comes along all the time. It’s scary, and you don’t know where you’ll end up, which is why most people aren’t too keen. But every now and then, there’s one brilliant person who just dives in. An explorer. Like Valentina Tereshkova. You know who that is?’

Tatiana shook her head.

Valery pushed his hands into his pockets. The stamp was there; he had been moving it religiously between pockets whenever laundry day came around. He still couldn’t have said exactly why. He put it on the table. ‘She’s a cosmonaut.’

Like he’d hoped, Tatiana started to get a little spark. ‘When will I go?’

‘Hard to say. Before you’re grown up, but not right now.’

She thought about it. ‘Do you have to pack, for dying?’

‘No. You don’t take anything, just yourself.’

Her eyes came up fast. ‘Like the people on the red trains,’ she said quietly.

He had to sit down. He could deal with a six-year-old who wanted to ask about dying, and he could explain nuclear fusion to anyone who was happy to hear him bore on about it, but the idea of the trains hit him like a bullet in the gut. ‘No. No, not like that. Where did you see the red trains?’

‘At Chelyabinsk station. They go to the bad places.’

‘Yes. They do.’ He sighed. ‘But not you. This is … something else altogether. There’s no train, for you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am certain.’